That Music List

Saturday, 17 October 2026

LIST 276 - 17/10/2026

Hello again,

One of the many, many lovely things about indiepop is how it reminds one that not all performers of a pensionable age are libidinous, seedy gits or embittered racists (or both) cynically trotting out exactly the same sets of decades-old fodder year after year.

Hence Would-Be-Goods and Railcard's matinee gig in Sheffield last Saturday afternoon. Every member of each band older than this fiftysomething, yet still creating new, beautiful art as vital as anything from their various storied careers.

Indeed, Railcard has only existed since 2025, so all of their imaginative, sometimes motorik take on indiepop (elevated further by Allison Thomson's swirling brass) is by definition new product. 2026 will not pass without Unstable Neighbour featuring somewhere in my top ten songs of the year. Maybe even top five.

Forty-six years on from debut single Baby It's You, and nearly as many since their days of larking about with Captain Sensible on videos and TOTP, what a fine thing it is to have seen two-thirds of Dolly Mixture - Debsey Wykes with Saint Etienne, Rachel Love fronting Railcard - in active service at gigs in the past four months. Over to you, Hester Smith.

Would-Be-Goods have always been one of the more elegant, literate and often darkly humourous indiepop acts of their respective, successive eras, and a choice selection of Jessica Griffin's delicious bon mots was served up on this, the band's first ever gig in Sheffield.

And served up in Jessica's "BBC accent", as they have evidently taken to calling it on their own Facebook presence; though as more regional twangs have worked their way in amongst those heard on Radio 4 latterly, perhaps the Received Pronuciation description of yore remains the more accurate. Either way, there is nothing remotely affectated, incongruous or jarring about it. Jessica's voice suits her words handsomely, and always has.

It was impossible not to note Jessica's knowing smiles during a perfect rendition of 2004 quickie Too Old, nor to hear the chuckles back from that portion of the audience of a comparable vintage to the band, perhaps recognising something about themselves in there.

Not that those of us present had come solely to respond to Would-Be-Goods' back catalogue; I doubt I'm alone in having loved the likes of Madame X, Dr Love and The Gallopers as much as any of the Él Records era cuts given an airing this afternoon.

Road closures and queues associated with Sheffield Utd's match virtually next door ensured I failed to get to Sidney and Matilda in time to see opening act Mudguard, Ivy and Dora Pursey by any other name.

A shame, but as demonstrated by the rest of the afternoon (and indeed the example of Ivy and Dora's none more famous parents), the precedent is there for an indiepop career of such longevity that I look forward to watching them also still doing this four decades hence. I'll likely be a head in a jar by then, but still a nodding away tastefully to indiepop in that jar sort of head.

***

Would-Be-Goods and Railcard both deservedly earn themselves another run-out in this week's List, alongside other new or at least halfway recent material from Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan, Freak Slug, Caroline Rose, MAQUINA. and The Sweetest Ache.

File the first-named as yet another act whose first appearance here would not have been left as late as this week had TML not gone on hiatus for nearly eight years. Gordon Chapman-Fox's restlessly prolific output as Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan has taken in seven albums since 2021 already, with number eight Industrial Growth due out at the end of this month.

Still unmistakably, recognisably Warrington-Runcorn, if This Machine suggests a perceptible change of direction to long-term fans of the project, it's definitely by design. Gordon notes on the Bandcamp write-up for the forthcoming album listening party that this is a heavier work, a visceral response to darker times in the world right now.

Formerly a veteran of rock and grindcore bands in and around the Wigan area, Gordon's switch to ambient, synthwave, sometimes experimental electronic music was influenced in part by listening to the output of such as Warp Records and noting its capacity to be at least as brutal and extreme as anything pounded out of a loud guitar.

I wouldn't have to look far into my own collection to find other material which backs that assertion to the hilt (from Felix Kubin to many of the releases by the Tigerbeat6 label); and if the lead single is any indicator, Industrial Growth stands an excellent chance of proving Gordon right yet further.

Without giving too much away, the promotional video ultimately finds Gordon in a predicament that even calling Eileen Bilton on 39591 won't help with. If you know, you know...

(Seen in Liverpool on 20/03/2018, a trip back home to Runcorn - not via Warrington, alas - awaits for YX12 GGO, an AlexanderDennis Enviro200 integral single decker. Halton Transport was one of the last surviving municipal bus companies in Britain, serving Runcorn and Widnes before going into liquidation at the start of 2020. Of the few remaining examples, the nearest to Runcorn now is... Warrington. Picture is the author's own)

Based many hundreds of miles away from Warrington or Runcorn, but seen in the north west of England not so many weeks ago, Lisbon three-piece MAQUINA. were the finds of this year's Manchester Psych Fest, according to the very lovely Joel, Steve and Izabela of Sheffield Live's The Breakdown weekly new music feast.

They certainly sold them to me in a chat a few weeks ago now. Guitars treated to sound as much like anything other than guitars has long worked for me, to the extent of maintaining a personal measuring system of Quiques, named after the 1993 Seefeel album which bent guitar sounds at least as far out of shape as My Bloody Valentine's Loveless, if not more so.

On a scale of one to ten Quiques, where 1 is acoustic guitar fragility and 10 is Imperial off of Quique itself (qv. List #274), it sounds as if MAQUINA. can manage about a high 8 live. Whether or not the studio equivalents manage the feat so effectively, the Body Transmission album is nevertheless still a tremendous slab of pounding, motorik, rocky noise, wholly deserving of your time.

If MAQUINA. remind me of anything, it would be dance-metal pioneers Cubanate, an act whom the rock circles they frequented didn't always appear to know what to make of. Kerrang! would award them Single of the Week garlands. Interactions with Bruce Dickinson in his then Radio One Rock Show hosting capacity would be strained or antagonistic. Carcass fans would just want to kick confrontational, extrovert singer Marc Heal's head in.

Either way, feel free to perform your own compare and contrast between Agony and Oxyacetylene, the latter additionally another staple of my mid-1990s German darkwave/industrial club-going days. Nobody there seemed to mind it being played.

***

One of the joys of compiling That Music List is permitting myself complete stylistic about-turns from one track to the next if I so choose. Believe it or not, however, it's something I agonised over doing for years when younger.

Which actually makes for the better experience - keeping stylistically broadly similar tracks together to achieve the smooth flow of many compilations, from Now That's What I Call Music through to Indie Top 20; or the switches (carefully curated and chosen switches, nonetheless) from one genre to another to another that one might have expected of a typical John Peel show or a 1981 episode of Top of the Pops (the best, most anything-goes year of chart pop ever, and I won't hear otherwise)?

I think somewhere along the line I decided that neither approach was necessarily wrong, but that a gradual flow suits a physical compilation best and a genre-hopping approach is better for radio or online. I am certainly happy for you all to discuss that in the comments either here or on That Music List's Facebook presence (newly reactivated after an even longer hiatus than the blog itself).

All of which is a possibly unnecessarily long way of saying that the rock-metal of Cubanate is followed this week by the none gentler sound of The Sweetest Ache, with impunity.

If this indiepop act from Swansea (an actual Swansea Sound, you could say) never quite counted among my absolute favourite Sarah Records bands first time around, that speaks more about the incredible competition for my attention put up by that label's many-tentacled roster as 1990 became 1991.

The first two The Sweetest Ache singles - Sarahs 36 and 39 - were flanked numerically, and roughly chronologically also, on one side by The Sea Urchins, St Christopher and Another Sunny Day, on the other side by The Springfields, Heavenly and The Orchids, and in between by Even As We Speak and So Said Kay by The Field Mice. It's hard to be heard over all of those, and that's before factoring in any albums and compilations released around then, too.

The passing of time has given their Sarah output space to breathe and find the higher level of appreciation it deserves (from me and others), a process given further momentum by the release of a retrospective collection on Daydream Records last year and a gradual return to the live sphere.

Hence, ultimately, Reframed, a first album in 33 years slated for release on November 9th (the weekend after an appearance at the Malaga Popfest) and - as if to reinforce the points about collaborative label releases made last week - put out simultaneously in different territories by Shelflife, Old Bad Habits, Fastcut and Windmill Records, the last-named being the imprint of Chris Mabbs and Neil Shumsky (variously All Ashore!, Velodrome 2000, Plouf!, Bouquet, etc.) and itself inactive for 34 years until last year.

Expect Sarah era tracks repurposed acoustically. Expect also the likes of the gorgeous brand new track Speak to Me, delivered with all of the born-again joy and freedom of a band palpably delighted to have once again found its audience, and acquired some more, after so long away. I look forward to reading up about their current and future plans when edition #4 of Jane Duffus's Zine Things Happen hits the doormat in the coming days.

Not to labour a point, but the assertion of a few years back that Sarah Records is over is seeming wider of the mark with every passing month of 2026, isn't it?

***

That feels like quite enough of my blether and prattle for one week, I think. Suffice it to say, other highlights of this week's selection include, but are no means limited to, the following:

Four choices from Dystopia by Midnight Juggernauts (2007), this week's A Loved Album. There was a time in the 2000s and into the start of the 2010 when it felt as if Midnight Juggernauts and The Presets were taking it in turns to try to win the vote as my favourite Australian electronic act. The more inclined of the two to drop in a bit of guitar, the Melbourne trio appear to have ground to a halt a decade or so ago (Andrew Szekeres instead keeping himself busy occasionally working with The Avalanches), but their thumping good set in the woods at Latitude in 2008 won't be leaving my memory any time soon.

A track from an imprecise date some time between 1979 and 1981 by experimental Sheffield duo Mein Glasfabrik. I wonder how many people would take your word for it if you'd told them it was a Boards of Canada outtake; the way it anticipates the enigmatic Scottish duo's sound and atmosphere by a generation is really quite something.

Altogether less mysterious and far poppier, My Forgotten 80s this week comprises a track from the late Robert Allen, better known to fellow Basildon Set scenesters as Robert Marlow. Seemingly positioned to become the next breakout star from that social stratum after Alison Moyet, Vince Clarke and Martin L. Gore (all of whom he was in bands with previously), the Clarke co-produced I Just Want to Dance was the second of four ultimately non-hit singles but the one I seem to remember Radio One briefly getting behind the most. Copies of his sole album The Peter Pan Effect, unreleased until 1999 (sixteen years after this single), are still findable, for those keenest to discover whether Robert was a should have been star largely lost to time.

J xx

Click on the video or link to play each tune (links last checked as all working 16/10/2026).
Click here for a glossary explaining TML features.
Click here for a directory of updated older Lists.

WARRINGTON-RUNCORN NEW TOWN DEVELOPMENT PLAN - This Machine (2026)

STRANGELOVE - Sand (1994)

WOULD-BE-GOODS - Dr Love (2026)

HOR - Topless Political Statement (1998)

MELODY’S ECHO CHAMBER - You Won’t Be Missing That Part of Me (2012)

RAPPING SONGS
THE DISPOSABLE HEROES OF HIPHOPRISY - Television (The Drug of the Nation) (1991)

A LOVED ALBUM: Midnight Juggernauts - Dystopia (2007)
MIDNIGHT JUGGERNAUTS - Into the Galaxy
MIDNIGHT JUGGERNAUTS - So Many Frequencies

MEIN GLASFABRIK – Track No. 5 (~1979-1981; unreleased)

AMSTERDAM - Nostalgia (2005)

SOURPATCH - You Knew (2013)

SMOG - Ex-Con (1997)

MAQUINA. - Agony (2026)

WIR SIND DIE NEUEN GÖTTER
CUBANATE - Oxyacetylene (1994)

THEN AND NOW: The Sweetest Ache
THE SWEETEST ACHE - Speak to Me (2026)
THE SWEETEST ACHE - If I Could Shine (1990)

FREAK SLUG - Wishing Bone (2026)

A C ACOUSTICS - Stunt Girl (1996)

LAWRENCE ARABIA – Eye A (2008)

DO MAKE SAY THINK - I Love You (La La La) (1999)

ANNA BURCH - Party’s Over (2020)

A LOVED ALBUM: Midnight Juggernauts - Dystopia (2007)
MIDNIGHT JUGGERNAUTS - Ending of an Era
MIDNIGHT JUGGERNAUTS - Shadows

IF WE DO, WE’LL KEEP IT ALIVE
BIG JOANIE - Way Out (2018)

CAROLINE ROSE - Hello Again, Jim (2026)

SOLARSCAPE - After the Flood (2000)

ALEX AND THE CHRISTOPHER HALE BAND - O, Cowardly King of the Canary Islands! (2015/2022)

BIKINI KILL – Feels Blind (1991)

RAILCARD - When You Say You Love Me Something’s Wrong (2026)

MY FORGOTTEN 80s IS MORE FORGOTTEN THAN YOUR FORGOTTEN 80s
ROBERT MARLOW - I Just Want to Dance (1983)

IN LOVING MEMORY: Tim Curry
TIM CURRY - I Can Make You a Man (1974)

Saturday, 10 October 2026

LIST 275 - 10/10/2026 (a sixth cover versions special)

Hello again,

"Sunday in Sheffield, people. DID YOU GO TO CHURCH? Don't worry, this is Tchurch!"

And the gospel according to Tchotchke at Sidney & Matilda last Sunday night was very, very good indeed.

The Playin' Dumb single from last year's album of the same name was my belated way into this New York three-piece, so inevitably a pristine rendition of that was always going to number among my highlights of the evening.

However, I also loved how much they also draw from a wider palette than just the '60s bubblegum girl groups that are the usual starting points of reference. I've seen Todd Rundgren's poppier output mentioned before now, and I got that entirely.

Tonight offered hints of other early '70s US power pop such as The Raspberries, too, plus a cover of the Bo Diddley-penned Mickey & Sylvia standard Love Is Strange which sounded for all the world like Mink DeVille until the vocals kicked in.

The last-named wasn't the only cover on the night, given other tasteful and appropriate selections from Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons and The Shangri-Las, the latter a rip-roaring run through Bulldog by way of an encore.

A tremendous set overall, even with singer/drummer Anastasia Sanchez demonstrably full of the lurge to have hit the trio on their travels, yet still nailing song after song. It's frightening to imagine how awesome they'd be at 100% full power.

I wonder whether they had any takers for the guitar on the merch stall for which they were asking £1,200. That's a bit of a change from the usual seven inch single and pin badge fare.

It was nice also to come across the work of support act Doe (not the 2010s trio of the same name) for the first time.

A front line of singer-guitarists who could pass for a young Emma Anderson and Miki Berenyi from Lush, but a sound which couldn't quite - some 90s shoegaze inflections, yes, but the psychedelic blues description I'd seen online was more accurate.

Early days, I'm assuming, and if so a promising start, all the more so on the night with a stand-in bassist deployed.

***

Talk of Tchotchke isn't entirely irrelevant to this week's List theme, given their aforementioned propensity for a well-chosen cover version. Here are another thirty-three covers - some of them personal favourites of the recording artists doing the covering, some less so, some better executed than others, but all interesting to me one way or another.

From Phil Ochs to Cerrone, from The Raspberries to Lightnin' Hopkins, from Young Marble Giants to Lady Gaga, there's a bit of everything in here.

(I can be persuaded either way, incidentally, as to whether DJ Kaos counts as a cover version, a remix, or just pilfering. Let's go with the first-named today).

You'll find a few examples of cover subject and cover object adjacent to each other, all quite deliberately so. Specifically: Stevie Wonder covering The Beatles next to a Stevie Wonder cover by the Red Hot Chili Peppers (the latter not all that regular visitors to this parish otherwise); a Magnetic Fields cover by analogue synthpop supergroup Doublespeak next to Stephin Merritt (in his Future Bible Heroes incarnation) having a crack at Vicky Leandros's 1967 Eurovision entry (and wasn't her rendition of that one of the less painful guest spots at the 2026 Contest, by the way?); and Carter USM's run through Rent by the Pet Shop Boys next to Blade's hip-hop reinterpretation of Lenny and Terrence by Carter USM.

It's worth spending a moment or two considering the original of Lenny and Terrence, released in October 1993 as the second single from the previous month's Post Historic Monsters and possible to regard as the precise moment that some of the music weeklies and monthlies started to go after Carter (get Carter, even).

At least one singles reviewer lazered in on the fact that, given a bountiful array of contemporaenous stars whose music Jim Bob and Fruitbat could have slagged off in song, they namechecked two black performers and nobody else.

No objective reading of the lyrics sheet can conclude that this was a racist act, but it was an extraordinarily clumsy one, inviting bad faith agents to think or presume the worst of them. Were social media around in 1993, its more pernicious elements would have enjoyed a feeding frenzy.

A rant at two artists who between them racked up two top five albums (one a number one) and seven top 30 singles that calendar year wasn't the flex the south London duo might have thought it was anyway. Moreover, for all of Lenny Kravitz's affectations of Hendrix and whoever else on Are You Gonna Go My Way, Symphony or Damn by the artist still known at the time as Terence Trent D'Arby was conversely a strong, varied and more authentic-feeling collection blessed with at least one genuinely excellent single.

Maybe not surprisingly, therefore, Blade's more extended tirade lands its blows more successfully in the verse on Lenny than on Terence. See what you think.

If the inkies went after Carter USM in the mid-1990s, they weren't any less sparing of Fischerspooner in and around the time of their #1 debut album at the start of this century, the music press's ire drawn by anything from the band's apparent style over substance to the eye-watering sum paid by Ministry of Sound for their signature.

I suspect there was also something unspoken and a bit nastier at play, Warren Fischer and Casey Spooner's flamboyant music and personae largely at odds with the determinedly earnest (and mostly heterosexual male) guitar band image and music which certain papers strove to promote instead to the near-exclusion of much else. (See also the odium directed towards the similarly stylish Romo scene and acts five years prior, at the height of Britpop, by all bar perhaps a couple of Melody Maker scribes).

Fischerspooner only actually split up seven years ago after what might be considered a broadly unfulfilled career (certainly from the perspective of racking up any smash hits), but for my money I'd still take the deceptively measured, serene cover of Wire's The 15th from that debut album over a hundred of the Starsailors they were shunned for any day of the week.

A cover of a 2001 song rather than a 2001 cover of something older, Alien Chicks' glorious tear through Missy Elliott's Get Ur Freak On from the new EP released only eight days ago makes them - I think - the first act to appear in consecutive Lists since we came back at the start of the year. Right place, right time.

The year 2000, meanwhile, bore witness to the arrival in the charts of Sugababes, at once the coolest, smartest British girlpop band of them all; and including Pink Opaque's recent - and appropriately reverential yet characteristically sparkly - cover of Overload is the very least I can do after failing to get to Pete and Danielle's first ever headline performance (back at Sidney and Matilda) this Wednesday just gone. Trust you knocked it out of the park, both.

Finally, there's an indiepop cover of Bizarre Love Triangle... because you're never far away from an indiepop cover of Bizarre Love Triangle. The New Order staple is one of those songs, along with Emma's House by The Field Mice, which seems to get covered disproportionately often by indiepop acts, almost by way of a rite of passage.

The Frente! interpretation bundled on to volume #20 of Indie Top 20 gets the nod this time, but I could just have easily included Even As We Speak's. Or Echosmith's. Or Ishan's. Or Glaiza De Castro's. Or Whirl's (the last-named at least adding a bit of late-'80s lo-fi fuzz to proceedings).

Kids - it's a classic song and all that, but you don't need to knock any more of these out. We won't think any less of you. We promise.

J xx

Click on the video or link to play each tune (links last checked as all working 05/10/2026).
Click here for a glossary explaining TML features.
Click here for a directory of updated older Lists.

DOCH DER COUNTDOWN LÄUFT
DIE ÄRZTE - Gehn wie ein Ägypter (1987)

BIS - Twilight Cafe (2014)

MAXWELL FARRINGTON & LE SUPERHOMARD – The Train (2020)

NINE INCH NOIZE - Memorabilia (2026)

THE OBLIVIANS - Vietnam War Blues (1996)

CHRISTY MOORE - Changes (2005)

DANCE HALL AT PEEL ACRES

DJ KAOS - Oceans Apart (1996)

BULLETPROOF

RED HOT CHILI PEPPERS - Higher Ground (1989)

STEVIE WONDER – We Can Work It Out (1970)

ADAM GREEN – Eating Noddemix (2003)

BMX BANDITS - Sunshine Day (1995)

THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS - Overnight Sensation (Hit Record) (2026)

COMPILED BY CHET & BEE (AND SOMETIMES TIM)
FRENTE! - Bizarre Love Triangle (1994)

MY FORGOTTEN 80s IS MORE FORGOTTEN THAN YOUR FORGOTTEN 80s
BILLY BREMNER - Shatterproof (1984)

PINK OPAQUE - Overload (2026)

ALEX KAPRANOS & CLARA LUCIANI – Summer Wine (2020)

ERASURE - Supernature (Daniel Miller & Phil Legg Remix) (1989)

THE REAL TUESDAY WELD – Polka Face (2011)

KIRSTY MacCOLL - You Just Haven’t Earned It Yet, Baby (1989)

FISCHERSPOONER - The 15th (2000)

I LOVE POP MUSIC AND I WILL FIGHT YOU
McFLY - Baby’s Coming Back (2007)

RAPPING SONGS
BLADE - Lenny and Terrence (1994)

CARTER USM - Rent (1990)

DOUBLESPEAK - Smoke and Mirrors (2026)

FUTURE BIBLE HEROES - Love is Blue (1997)

THE FLAMING LIPS - God Only Knows (2012)

FRANK SIDEBOTTOM - Material Boy (1985)

EUROTASTIC
LEILA K – Ca Plane Pour Moi (1993)

TREMBLING BLUE STARS - Lady-O (2009)

ALIEN CHICKS - Get Ur Freak On (2026)

VIC REEVES - Black Night (1991)

TALLY HO! - Nature Boy (2012)

(No video available - please click on this Bandcamp link)

LAIBACH - Opus Dei (Life is Life) (1987)

Saturday, 3 October 2026

LIST 274 - 03/10/2026

(International Strike Force - Cumberland Arms, Newcastle-upon-Tyne 08/07/2000. Picture is author's own)

Hello again,

Firstly, a little apology if reading this blog has started to feel a bit of a feat of endurance this past couple of weeks. It's only occurred to me whilst compiling this one that with List #274 I've now gone twelve in a row without throwing in any sort of special or one-off by way of relief. That's the longest such sequence in the seventeen-year history of this blog, by two.

Perhaps the additional features introduced since I came back in January have added sufficient variety to stop things getting too samey, but even so.

There are actually a couple of specials more or less compiled and ready to share with you, including the first collection of cover versions since List #217 in late 2016; and in addition I did promise at least one more Feature Fest before the year was out. Trick now is working out how soon to drop these in once done.

If you can't wait that long for something a bit different (and why should you), perhaps I can recommend List #201, which is one of the latest to which I've returned in order to sort out the wonky text formatting and repair any broken links.

It's entitled The Many Guises of Bobby Wratten, and features a representative sample of works by, collaborations with and covers of the one songwriter whose output has meant the most to me my entire adult life. And perhaps has to some of you, too.

***

In terms of this week's fare, Then and Now returns to enable me to say three words I wasn't anticipating committing to print any time soon - new Seefeel album.

Away even longer - fifteen years - than Warp stablemates Boards of Canada, the release of the Sol.Hz long-player was not premiered with any of that act's enigmatic tasters, videotapes and the like.

It's no less deserving of fanfare for all that, however. Whilst not a victory lap as such, Sol.Hz certainly acknowledges and references much of Mark Clifford and Sarah Peacock's previous recorded work, albeit with some of the more abrasive percussive tendencies smoothed off or dispensed with altogether as a predominately ambient feel is aimed for. Not much in here thuds like, say, Tied.

I've also noted and appreciated the occasional nod, on tracks such as AM Flares, to the watery guitar washes of Cocteau Twins, with whom the original four-piece Seefeel toured the UK and mainland Europe in the early-mid 1990s. (My younger brother and his schoolmate, devoted Cocteaus fans both at the time, had one of their nearest things to a rock 'n' roll moment when their loitering outside the stage door of the Manchester Academy in early 1994 earned them a pre-gig football kickabout with assorted members of both bands. I digress).

Other new or recent-ish stuff this week comes from Sylvan Esso, Alien Chicks, Heron & Crane, Orchids and One Dove side project Montjuïc, Perennial and reactivated Californian indiepop veterans The Autocollants.

The last-named, nearly but not quite doing a Panixphere in taking over thirty years to release a debut album (out on Shelflife Records and licensed in the UK to Nick Godfrey's Precious Recordings of London imprint), could actually have been properly inserted into a Tangle of Jangle triple bill. Come to think of it, with Caramel and also Bart and Friends included this week, I've practically included that feature by stealth anyway.

Further probing of the Shelflife website confirms the release of a split single earlier this year featuring The Autocollants and their heroes The Cat's Miaow, like the aforementioned Bart and Friends a band which can claim Australian indiepop's ubiquitous Bart Cummings among their number. My love of The Cat's Miaow and successor band Hydroplane is a matter of record on this blog and elsewhere, so I'll offer you only prohibitively short odds on one of the contributions from the former (apparently songs written last century but newly recorded) featuring on a List in the very near future.

28 years earlier than that Shelflife/Precious collaboration, there was the Troubleman Unlimited/Slampt Underground Organisation joint release Taking a Chance on Chances, a fine document of all that was right and good in turn of the century UK and US DIY punk/indiepop. Showcasing one act from each side of the pond seemed the way to go with this one, hence a selection from both Assembly Line People Program and International Strike Force.

In the latter's case this is horribly overdue. Having named-dropped them a few times during the lifetime of That Music List, usually in the context of important northeast England DIY acts of the 1990s, it occurred to me that I've never actually included a track by International Strike Force before now - only ever their previous incarnation Golden Starlet. Oops.

A fierce, feisty, funny, invigorating proposition live, more so than the fairly static photo from my archive above gives them any credit for, singer/guitarist Ms C and company are one of so many acts from around then who can count themselves unlucky not to have existed at a time when a place on any Indietracks festival line-up, and the adoration of many new fans there, could have been almost guaranteed.

Saturday, 26 September 2026

LIST 273 - 26/09/2026

(The Piney Gir Country Roadshow - Tapestry Goes West festival, Margam Park, Port Talbot 10/08/2007. Pictures are author's own)

Hello again,

Heaven knows how the photos at the top of this week's List will turn out, taken as they were 19 years ago on a temperamental first generation digital camera.

However, including a contemporaneous track by The Piney Gir Country Roadshow this week was all the excuse I needed to include these snaps of Piney herself, and permit myself a bit of time reminiscing about the Tapestry Goes West festival in August 2007 at which they were taken.

This would have been a year before my first trips to either Latitude or Indietracks, so my first outdoor festival experience of any sort (indoor ones had been attended for up to twelve years prior). Unfamiliar with that sort of festival-going as I was up until then, I nevertheless knew sufficient to know that Tapestry's mixture of music, jousting, nettle ale, archery, walks around ruins and ostriches probably wasn't a strictly typical one. From 2003 to 2005, when this brainchild of club impresario Barry Stilwell had taken place in Cornwall, it had similarly juxtaposed live acts against a no less incompatible spaghetti western theme.

(Margam Castle, Margam House and Margam ostriches - Tapestry Goes West festival, Margam Park, Port Talbot 10/08/2007. Pictures are author's own)

Perhaps that's one of the reasons why Indietracks also appealed so much subsequently - indiepop, steam trains, owls and can crushing aren't always found on the same bill, either. I like variety. And the Tapestry bill also offered that in abundance despite a relatively modest total of only around 30-odd acts across two stages on two days.

Here was my first sighting in the flesh of gnarly one-man band Seasick Steve, not yet a year since breaking out to a wider audience but still some time before the full exposition of his former life as Steve Leach, frontman of disco act Crystal Grass (as sampled by S-Express).

It would be a toss-up as to who drew the biggest crowd of the weekend, either Steve or mysterious, Bacofoil-clad proggers Chrome Hoof. The latter won the audience participation prize of the weekend, at least, leading all those present on a procession - accompanied, with singer Lola Olafisoye chanting - at the conclusion of their set before burning some sort of effigy in an oil drum. You don't get that everywhere.

My fellow travellers were particularly looking forward to seeing psychedelic Medieval revivalists Circulus, as - on the strength of such as My Body is Made of Sunlight, shared in the very first List - was I. We didn't quite get our wish, the band's autocratic founder Michael Tyack - think The League of Gentleman's Ollie Plimsolls with a greater predilection for a cape and pointy shoes - having recently fired almost all of the band and continuing here with just the crumhorn player still in tow.

Those fans intent on still throwing themselves about to Power to the Pixies et al, regardless of the lack of any percussive aid, duly did, but it wasn't quite what many of us had in mind. Buy the first three Circulus albums - and maybe Tom Cox's writings on Michael also - and remember them that way instead.

My own record shopping list increased incrementally following Tapestry weekend, notably to include the then new to me Threatmantics, a south Wales band at a south Wales festival. Once I'm finally sufficiently happy with my Welsh language special List to publish it on these pages, you can be certain their often keys/bass/viola-led fare will be making an appearance.

From memory Tapestry Goes West lasted for only one more renewal after our 2007 attendance, destined to become just another small chapter in the multifaceted story of boutique British music festivals from the late c20th onwards.

Nevertheless, I'm glad it afforded this greenhorn a nice enough experience so as not to have put me off open-air festivals forever. I would definitely not have coped with a Glastonbury (comfortably more than double the £60 weekend price of Tapestry in 2007) first time up, though I suspect I wouldn't even now.

***

Other than overlong dribblings about a defunct Welsh music festival, what can I offer you this week?

1) New or recent things from a bunch of acts all making their first appearances on a List, namely Melanie A Davis & The Madness, Planette Automatic, Denzel Curry & Kenneth Blume, Inner Magic ft Ruth Radelet, Salt Water Criminals and Massachusetts-based mod-poppers The Chelsea Curve.

In the case of the last-named, this is very sadly a posthumous appearance, The Chelsea Curve's singer-bassist Linda Bean-Pardee (also briefly a member of Gang Of Four and a graphic designer of some repute) having been lost to cancer in mid-August.

A fierce, joyful spirit, by all accounts, and the Boston music scene is doubtless poorer for her passing.

2) Another posthumous release, albeit one that would have been harder to foresee, Cocoon is one of eight newly discovered tracks recorded by much-loved bass/sax/drums trio Morphine in 1999, shortly before singer Mark Sandman's fatal heart attack. Received wisdom was that 2009's At Your Service double CD of unreleased tracks completely cleared the vaults of Morphine recordings for ever after. Not so.

The familiarity of Mark's bass rumble and Dana Colley's tenor sax mark this out as unmistakably Morphine within seconds, and there's a comfort as well as a sadness in that.

3) Straight In At... returns this week, with a play of four of the new entries from the official UK top 100 singles chart on today's date 22 years ago. By 2004 we were still in the peak period of chart entry volatility, and the (count them) 29 tracks I had to choose from this time were far from a record high total.

I could have gone for some better known tracks by Groove Armada (I See You Baby, no less), Ian Brown or Muse, or the week's highest entry from one of Donny Osmond's occasional commercial rehabilitations. My four choices are my clear favourites of the lot, however, Brian Wilson and Devendra Banhart's having even both been bought on the week of release.

The offering by Zen is a representative example - and an excellent, addictive example - of a track from one of the dozens of house, hard house or drum 'n' bass double A-side 12 inches that were peppering the lower reaches of the top 100 by the mid-2000s; some with tracks by the same artist, others split between two.

Conundrum sounds for all the world like something I could have added to the Dance Hall at Peel Acres feature by now, and John Peel did indeed play plenty of Zen St George's bountiful output, but not this example if the Peel Wiki is (as it usually is) taken to be true. The great man would pass away just four weeks later.

(NB I've just realised how much mention of death there is this week - I do apologise to you if this has proven in any way triggering).

4) More Italo disco, this time from 1983 and featuring a performance in the video in front of what resembles the then set of popular teenagers' quiz show Blockbusters (also launched in 1983; a coincidence, surely...).

Happy Children was a curious beast, not from a musical perspective - the stabby keys and long intro were copybook Italo disco - but in being a lyrical call to 1980s Italian children to transcend their hard lives, as delivered by a posh kid whose life probably won't be nearly so hard either way.

Pietro Paolo Pelandi, the man who is P. Lion, is the son of the count of the Alzano Lombardo province in northern Italy, y'see. Doubtless he meant well, but less charitable observers may liken it to a minor British royal writing an anti-poverty track and dedicating it to the hundreds of thousands of kids on their uppers in such as England's historic Red Wall political constituencies. The reception may not be the most sympathetic.

5) Mid-1980s David Bowie as seldom heard before, given a minimal, almost whispered German language reinterpretation. It's a source of personal irritation to me how little of cerebral San Franciscan synth-prodders Helen Lundy Trio's output is available anywhere online, and adding some tracks from their eponymous debut album onto YouTube remains a rainy day to-do job. For now at least there's this, as taken from early c21st Bowie tribute album After Low.

6) A reminder of the briefish but lovely existence of Finnmark!, as the name implies an unashamedly Scandiphile indiepop act based around the talents of former Just Handshakes (We're British) bassist Edward Forth.

Owner of, by Pete Green's reckoning, the most lugubrious voice they'd ever heard in indiepop (a compliment, for the avoidance of doubt), Edward's tasteful choice of covers (Guided by Voices) and knowing references (Considering a Move to Sweden likely requires no further explanation) always made for an enjoyable set on the occasions our paths crossed; and Brännö, a paean to the Southern Göteborg island of the same name, endures as probably the act's most popular track on account of its appearance on the 2013 Indietracks companion compilation.

I wonder whether Edward remembers the aftermath of a Just Handshakes... gig at the Red House in Sheffield in autumn 2011, wherein he explained in compelling, convincing detail to several of us present how the business model of Sheffield staple Hendersons Relish is a thing of wonder. If only I'd known him twenty years earlier, I could have reproduced that in my Economics A-Level exam and maybe not failed it with a single digit percentage score...

J xx